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But Crete still remained outside of the Ottoman Turkish orbit. The Venetians had held the
island of Crete since 1204, when they bought it at very low cost from a grateful Byzantine
Emperor, Isaac II Angelos, whom they had helped restore, at least titularly, to the throne at
Constantinople. Especially important at this time, and throughout the next four centuries,
was Crete’s largest town, Heraklion, known afterwards by the Venetian name, Candia. It was
here that Venice was to have its chief trading colony, soon replacing the town’s population,
and much of the rest of the island, with their own citizens. From then through the sixteenth
century almost all Venetian trade in the Eastern Mediterranean went through Candia, hence
the reason for the agreements made between the Ottomans and the Venetians. 30
Once Cyprus fell in 1571, Crete obviously became a target. The defeat at Lepanto
31
protected it for the moment – any attack of the island needed a navy both to transport troops
there and to protect the transport ships. However, by 1573 the Ottomans had recovered and
the Venetians, knowing that they could not count on much further support from the Christian
principalities allied with them at Lepanto, sought for peace. Agreeing to recognize Turkish
authority over Cyprus, the Venetians also paid an indemnity of 300,000 ducats, but they were
allowed to keep Crete, at least for a moment. 32
The following 70 years were filled with anticipation for the Cretans. They must have
known that the Venetians could not hold on for long against the Ottomans, especially as the
latter’s power was increasing while the former’s was decreasing. But as long as the Venetians
kept to the treaty the Turks let the Cretans alone, even diffusing a couple of incidents which
might have provoked Ottoman military outrage – usually by paying further indemnity. But
33
time ran out in 1644.
Actually the reason the truce failed was not the fault of the Venetians at all, but of the
Knights Hospitallers, the former enemy of the Ottomans at Rhodes who had now relocated
to Malta – and who had withstood an incredibly aggressive attack by the Turks in 1565. On
28 September 1644 six Hospitaller galleys captured a small fleet of pilgrims on their way
to Mecca from Turkey. A violation of the laws of war at any time, that there were gifts from
the Turkish court and individuals associated with the family of Sultan Ibrahim I aboard these
ships meant that the Ottomans had to respond. Despite an attempted intercession by the Ve-
netians, the Ottomans blamed them for not keeping the other Christian powers in line – the
Hospitallers put into a Cretan port with their booty immediately after the piracy – and their
response was an assault of Crete. 34
The Ottoman fleet was huge. One contemporary Venetian source numbers the ships at

in the conflict between Europe and Turkey, as does Victor Davis Hanson, Carnage and Culture: Landmark
Battles in the Rise of Western Power (New York: Doubleday, 2001), pp. 233-77.
30 On the history of Venetian Crete see Sally McKee, Uncommon Dominion: Venetian Crete and the Myth of
Ethnic Purity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000).
31 On the fall of Cyprus see Setton, Papacy and the Levant, IV:923-1073.
32 Caroline Finkel, Osman’s Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire (New York: Basic Books, 2005), p.
161.
33 For example, in 1638 after Venetians incited Turkish wrath by blockading sixteen North African ships in the
harbor of Ottoman Valona. See Kenneth M. Setton, Venice, Austria, and the Turks in the Seventeenth Century
(Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1991), pp. 108-09.
34 Setton, Venice, Austria and the Turks, pp. 110-15.